Abstract

There are two commonly recognized anomalies in the stock market, namely short-run momentum and long-run reversals. Under these two financial market anomalies, there are two trading strategies – momentum trading and contrarian trading – that can be adopted for the purpose of making profits. We model an asset market in which momentum traders, contrarian traders and informed rational speculators make transactions. We discovered that under certain conditions, the self-profiting motive of informed speculators will lead to their price manipulation behaviors, and result in momentum and reversals phenomenon on the asset price. We also found that the scenario of the relative quantity of the two types of behavioral traders and their profit margins is similar to that of a minority game.

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